Tom Hardy's Eight Minute Rant About Pants

On the occasion of his birthday, revisiting Tom Hardy's epic monologue about the current state of men's pants.

Tom Hardy turns 37 today. In addition to acting in a wide variety of projects—laid out in the profile I wrote of him in the May issue of Esquire—Tom Hardy is developing a line of streetwear for the British style magazine and fashion label Blag. One night, when I was working on my story about him, I happened to call Hardy when he was simultaneously memorizing lines for a movie and perusing fashion catalogs that his designers had sent him. The catalogs were full of track pants, and no sooner had Hardy picked up the phone than he launched into an uninterrupted eight-and-a-half-minute monologue that is the track-pants equivalent of Henry V at Agincourt:

You'd be fucking surprised—surprised—at the shocking collection of pants that I'm looking at right now. The world is just pants, isn't it? It's fucking ridiculous. Do you know what I mean? It's like, What happened to man's pants—you know? Because I have a very clear line, when it comes to pants. "Will my beard look cooler in these pants? And can I make a clean run for the border in them?" You know what I mean? And you know what's a good start? Not looking like I'm a member of One Direction—that's a good start.

You want to give somebody a pair of track pants. You know, nice and fashionable. But at the same time, they have to be useful. You can put stuff in the pockets. You can herd pedestrians into safe zones and take out the rubbish in them, your naked torso sweating and rippling in the sunlight. You can do the washing-up in them, barefoot and walking around the house. You can keep things in pockets and stuff like that. That's what pants are for. And to cover your exterior and keep you warm. But the pants that I'm seeing look like they're all sorts of metrosexual weird. The kind of thing that was coughed out of Minnesota and spat onto the streets of Brooklyn in the last ten years, for a secret reason that wasn't fair to any of us. Do you know what I mean? Now we have to crawl our way back into a real pair of pants. I mean, we should be allowed to have proper tracksuit pants—that's only fair, right? My favorite pants, the pants I wore to university—I see myself tending to my vegetables at the tender age of sixty-five wearing the same fucking pants! Because they're awesome. Those pants—pants with integrity. With a stripe down the side. Any color you fucking like. But not the pants I've been seeing.

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I've been sent a thousand samples. And all I can think is fucking hell, there's a bigger issue here. There's a much more insidious problem that we have. You know what I mean? We must get to the bottom of this. This is wrong. Never mind the pants. We must call the prime minister. Immediately. Men mustn't be wearing these pants. Because these are the pants that are supposed to be worn by the girlfriend. You know what I mean? On Sunday morning. They're those pants. You say, "Sugar, can I have my pants back?" And she's like, "No. I'm comfortable in your pants. Fuck off." So you have to wear boxer shorts in the cold. You have to go and shiver. You have to make tea and walk around in baggy, baggy underpants that your balls hang out of. And when your neighbors come to the door to give you garden tools and they look at you like, "Where are your pants?" And you can't say, "My wife is wearing them." That's what pants aresupposed to be. Track pants, you know. Anyway. My life.

I will not put pants on a shelf that have not passed the manly test. Mark my word. I hope you're with me on that one. I will give you a fucking pair of man's pants as soon as I manage to acquire a decent set. But at the moment, it's hard to get a pair of decent fucking man's track pants. Without zips or Velcro. Without various accoutrements that nobody fucking needs. And without pockets that you put your car keys in and they end up by your feet.

Because how many pockets do you need? You put too many pockets on tracksuit pants, and there's the fundamental fact that if you do not have the correct amount of elastic to hold them up, you don't have pants—you have ankle shackles made out of nylon. And it's impossible to win over a traffic warden who is trying to put a ticket on your car when your track pants are down around your ankles.

This sounds like common sense. But there's nothing common about sense, my friend. Especially in the fashion world. They're a different crew, over there.

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